Using LISTS to manage Twitter

Twitter can be a great tool for banter, relationship building, marketing and more. However it can also be a big time sink if your activity is not actively managed and focused, and return on time can be poor.

For example, your Tweet-stream can become very busy, taking up more of your time with distractions and you risk missing an important message.

You can be more focused, use your time better and see important messages if you use LISTS wisely.

Being on a list helps online reputation too. You will help  people you Follow by adding them to lists as it boosts their online reputation. And if you put out messages that others want to read as a priority then they will add you to their lists and give your reputation a lift.

You can also Follow a List someone else has created, saving you the effort of Finding and following individuals, so you can get results far quicker. See below for more on this!

With a bit of set-up and regular maintenance as part of your routine you should see more benefits and time savings from Twitter.

Here are some tips to get you started.

1. Create one or several LISTS for your Twitter account, either on  or in your desktop/dashboard application such as Hootsuite. If they’re public then think twice before creating a ‘customer’ or ‘prospect’ list.

2. Add key people you follow to a relevant list. Go through your ‘Following’ list, and as you follow new people also add then to a list where appropriate.

3. Add the LIST as a column in Hootsuite, or check it regularly in Twitter. Having created a list make use of it! Make it the first column on Hootsuite, rather than the Home Feed with everyone you’re following on it.

4. To be really smart, set-up an automatic publishing service. Try the Paper.li application to automatically create and publish a daily or weekly ‘paper’ by pulling together the top tweets from people in a list, ie. around a theme. A Tweet can be generated automatically to alert you and your followers. It’s a simple way to do Social Media Monitoring.

5. Every Friday, when you’re doing #FF (Friends Friday) and highlighting people worth following, why not add those people to your own ‘Friends’ list.

6. Save time and effort by following an existing list. Visit Listorious or other list site to see what lists are available. Choose to Follow a suitable list. Then add that list to your desktop ie. Hootsuite as a stream. This is an amazingly quick way to tap into Twitter for a topic.

7. Then for real benefits, in Listorious you can add lists you created or are listed in into their directory, or even approach curators of relevant lists and ask them to consider adding you to their list.

For more information visit the official Twitter Support page for Lists here.

Let me know how you get on via Comments below.

Mark.



Twitter – six steps beyond the basics

If you’ve mastered the basics of Twitter, (by following my Taming Twitter course or on your own) and built it into your daily routine it’s probably time to take stock. It may also be a great time to plan your next phase, to move yourself up through intermediate to advanced level skills, if you want to increase your returns.

Here are six tips and ideas to help you increase the benefits you gain from Twitter.

I’ll also post tips about your content plan and twitter housekeeping, so check for other posts on the ‘Hosted Apps and Tools’ blog.

The six tips are inevitably based on apps and tools. There are countless Twitter Tools available but here are some I’m finding very useful:

KLOUT – assesses your influence online. Scores of 75 are exceptional, and I’d say that above 40 is a great achievement. Below 40 and there’s room for improvement if you want to get real benefit from Twitter.  Register with http://www.klout.com , add your Facebook and LinkedIn details then track your score. See also my post on ideas to improve your influence.

TwitCleaner – one part of this tool assesses your profile and suggests improvements, or flags up areas or activity that might be compromising your reputation. The other side is covered in my post on Twitter Housekeeping.

Hootsuite – lets you manage 5 Twitter or other Social Media Accounts for free.  With Hootsuite I can easily post to different accounts and  set up different streams.  I can also monitor Direct and @ messages and respond, to develop dialogue and relationships.

To help to prioritise the incoming tweet streams here are two tips that I use:

• Filtering my main stream by Klout ie. set at 40 to remove the noise of Tweets from low influence people. It also provides a source of ReTweets of people with higher influence.
• Setting up Lists for Friends, Specialists etc. and then a Stream per list so I can periodically check per topic.

Paper.li – lets you create a daily or weekly online newspaper that is fed by a Twitter list you manage. It’s a very time-effective way to curate information and publish it. Read your own paper and let paper.li highlight key stories based on your interests.

Automate a Feed – you may want to ease the load by sending part of your content through automatically. Using Google Alerts and TwitterFeed or FeedBurner it is fairly easy to achieve this. Use with care to maintain content quality and ratio of manual and automatic content.

Go Mobile – I’ve added the Twitter App to my Blackberry so I can access the Twitter on the move, both via the Twitter App and Direct Tweets appear in my email feed too. Similar function will be available on other Smartphones.

Take an hour or so every month to review your account, and the tools you use, to improve the return you get from the time you spend on Twitter.

I hope that one or two of these tips prove really helpful to you.

Add a comment below to let me know how you use Twitter.

How to use LinkedIn for Business Lead Generation

LinkedIn is becoming a powerful platform not just for personal connections but, since November 2010, it has stepped up as a platform for promoting businesses, products and services too.

My 10 minute video will take you through the steps to set-up your company and your products and services, then outline how to promote them using the Free and the paid-for methods within LinkedIn.

And if you need help to implement this I  provide services to help you plan and execute the set-up and campaigns.

Mark.

Klout – what, why, how?

Klout is a measure of Influence or Social Proof that a person or account has in Twitter or Facebook.

This post provides answers to some of the more common questions and tips on how to improve your Klout.

What is Klout?

You may have seen the Klout score against Twitter profiles. It is an indicator of Social Proof or Influence, based on what other people have done with the person, profile or account which add an implicit endorsement to that profile.

Klout score goes from ‘ — ‘ or uncategorised, then from 1 to 100. The higher the score the more influence the person has.

A great example is Thomas Power of ecademy who currently has a score of 67.

It is not possible to directly improve your score, but there are some indirect steps that can be taken, as outlined below.

For Twitter Accounts the Klout algorythm includes, or takes into account:

• List Membership – how many LISTS the person has been put on – indicating that people prioritise this persons tweets in some way – see my blog post on lists for more explanation
• Total Retweets – the number of times messages have been retweeted
• Unique Retweets – how many people have retweeted
• Unique Message Retweets – how many messages have been retweeted
• Total Retweets for a specific message – the chain of retweets

This breadth of measures avoids the scenario where someone can have say 2 accounts, repeat the same tweet on one account multiple times and retweet it like for like on the second account. The Klout algorythm detects real breadth and depth of interesting content and a large and engaged network of people.

For Facebook Accounts the Klout algorythm includes, or takes into account:

• Total number of ‘Likes’ received
• Total number of Comments received
• Unique Likes – how many different people liked
• Unique comments – how many different people commented.

So, as with Twitter’, this detects breadth and depth rather than one account Liking and Commenting on another multiple times.

Why does Klout matter?

The main reason is that it indicates quality when someone is considering whether to follow someone else. This plays out in two situations:

• You are looking for people to follow. The assumption here is that you are choosing to follow people who you do not already know, as a way to increase the breadth of your own network. You may want to follow thought leaders in your neighbourhood, town, city etc, or people who share an interest, or who are thought leaders, specialists, gurus or experts on a topic. The Klout score is one way for you to select, or pre-select, who you want to follow.
• You are hoping to be followed by others. If you aspire to be seen as a leader and build up your influence, whether it is so people with a shared interest find you, or for more commercial reasons such as to be able to prospect for new leads and to do lead generation, then a higher Klout or influence or social proof score matters.

There are tools that allow you to select people on Twitter by their Klout Score.

Similarly you can Select Tweets by Klout Score in dashboard applications such as Hootsuite.

How can you influence your Klout score?

If you’re using Twitter then at some stage you may want to move beyond using it as an instant messaging tool between you and your close contacts. In which case taking a deliberate approach to increase your Klout score will be a worthwhile strategy.

The simple strategy is two-fold – Content and Followers.

• The better and more frequent your content the more people will see it, read and share it.
• The more followers you have the more influence you have.

This creates a virtuous circle too – and at some point your account moves into overdrive.

A more comprehensive strategy would include these seven steps:

1. Register your Twitter Account with Klout and also associate your Facebook account with this Klout profile to gain extra points. Then monitor your progress at least weekly so you track what works and see some pay-back.
2. Make your content worth reading as this helps you get listed by others who want to read your tweets ahead of those from others. Encourage others to add you to their lists, and initiate the process yourself by creating a list and adding them. See my blog post about lists.
3. Create a Daily or Weekly newspaper using Paper.li which sources content from a specific list that you create and manage. Then see who else publishes in your niche who has a lot of followers and create content and get onto their list on a reciprocal basis.
4. Make your content worth ReTweeting! Include a mix of Tweets and copy that encourages people to share your Tweets with their followers. This could be original material you wrote on your Blog and Tweeted, or other worthwhile content you mention, like quips, motivational quotes, forthcoming events etc. Ask your close contacts to Retweet.
5. Share the love – Retweet other people’s content in the hope they will Retweet yours in return. A Retweet says more than ‘Thank-you’ in social influence circles.
6. Identify influencers, learn from them, study what they do and apply it to your own account. Check your stats in Twitter and your Dashboard (Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, SocialOomph etc) to see who has high Klout and who is likely to reciprocate to boost both your scores.
7. Build up the number of people following you. Actively select and follow people on a regular basis and many will follow you in return.

Remember your objectives

Do remember your objectives and desired outcomes as it takes time to create content and manage and develop your Twitter and Social Media profile and you need to see a return. Maybe it is just about building your reputation and credibility. Maybe you want to drive traffic to your Blog. Maybe you are promoting products and services through Facebook. Maybe something else.

Having an external review of your Social Media strategy can prove extremely beneficial, to help you achieve the results you need and save you time in the process. I offer a Social Media Review and Action Plan service if you would find this beneficial.

SM4C and SM4B – segmenting Social Media

Is Social Media facing an uphill struggle to create a positive reputation in business circles? Is there widespread acceptance that time spent in online networks is time well spent?

Do consumers resent the commercial invasion of their private party? Is the push of marketing messages resented by socially oriented consumers?

Do the terms we use in what we call Social Media need to evolve to better reflect the activities undertaken there, especially in the B2B and Business context?

I feel that we need a better term than ‘Social’ to associate with business relationships initiated and/or developed through the new Media.

In other areas we have Business Breakfasts, Trade Publications, Professional Networks, Trade Associations, and other phrases that fairly reflect that the agenda is business and commercial, that you’ll meet other business people there and discuss business. If you don’t want to discuss business then stay away.

It also feels like Business has gate-crashed the Social Media party. Business networks like LinkedIn have drifted into the catch-all Social Media category and blurred the distinctions and expectations.

Facebook, Twitter and others have created business friendly functionality to attract the commercial audience.

To private individuals and business people this will surely lead to some confusion.

To help make the distinction, how about we reflect the B2B and B2C convention with two more refined terms….

• SM4C – Social Media for Consumers
• SM4B – Social Media for Business

Will you add your support to this?

Mark

Ten Twitter Tasks you can automate

Here’s a list of TEN Twitter tasks you can automate to save yourself time. There are many repetitive tasks needed to maintain and grow a ‘community’ through Twitter. There are two main task area for Automation, which each divide in two.

1. Tweets
• Sending
• Receiving/filtering
2. Followers
• Gaining followers
• Losing following

Automation means you can save time on these tasks and spend more time on higher value tasks and activities, like creating value laden Tweets and building relationships with your followers.

I’m not suggesting that you Should set these tasks up to run Automatically, or that these are the Only ways to automate these tasks. You need to consider your objectives and the results you want to achieve, the level of interaction you want to build and maintain, and also the Twitter rules about automation. Warning – If you are too aggressive with some of these activities you risk having your account Suspended or Terminated. Used with care they could really help you though.

1. Auto URL shortening – to save characters in your Tweets and save time over manually shortening each one. For example, using TweetDeck and linking it to your Bit.ly account and you also gain some statistics on how many clicks each link gets.
2. Auto notification of mentions – so you spot people who may want to start a relationship, or where you might want to return the favour. You could set up a column and a search within Tweetdeck and keep checking, or use SocialOmmph and set up an email alert to yourself with a daily summary of mentions.
3. Auto-follow people who follow you –so you help others build their follower base, and avoid being unfollowed if they need to improve their following:follower ratio. Various tools include this facility, like SocialOomph.
4. Auto-welcome new followers – sending out a welcome message to new followers can prompt a dialogue. Offering something of value helps to break the ice, but whether you want to suggest they follow you elsewhere, like Facebook, or that they look at one of your ‘offers’ is up to you. Various tools provide this and again SocialOomph is one that supports this.
5. Pre-scheduling Tweets to go automatically – where you want to send regular tweets (say every hour or two) you can pre-schedule them rather than having to remember throughout the day. You can still send the ad-hoc Tweets in addition. Several tools provide this, including SocialOomph. Warning – aggressively tweeting the same or very similar messages risks getting your account suspended.
6. Automate Twitter updates to also appear on your other web properties – links can be set up to Facebook, your website, blog and similar; so you are providing regular updates to your various audiences without much additional effort. There are many tools to do this, some free, some chargeable, for example the chargeable version of SocialOomph provides this.
7. Auto-unfollow people who aren’t following you – this matters if you are following 2000 people and less than 90% of them are following you back as Twitter imposes a limit. By unfollowing those who aren’t following back you improve your ratio. This facility is included in chargeable tools like Tweetadder, Tweetsbot, Hummingbird and may also be available in free tools. You can usually set up a White-list for people you don’t want to un-follow, ie. thought-leaders, celebrities etc. Warning – churning your ‘following’ aggressively risks getting your account suspended.
8. Auto-find and follow – to build up a seriously large follower community (ie above say 5,000 people) unless you are a celebrity. you are likely to need a tool to assist you. These help you find people who match your criteria enabling you to identify say 100-200 (or more) users a day to follow. The three tools mentioned above plus Friend Finder and others will help you identify people who meet certain criteria and then either automatically follow them or present you with a list so you chose who to follow. Warning – following lots of people en-mass risks getting your account suspended. Use the time delay or throttle facilities to trickle the requests.
9. Auto Filter your Tweetstream – at the early stages you might positively select some people and add them to a LIST so their tweets are easier to identify – ie through a Tweetdeck column. As your list grows this becomes more difficult and/or time consuming so you might want to filter out the SPAM messages. Some tools, ie. the Professional version of SocialOomph allow you to set up various filters to reduce the SPAM you need to wade through. You set various criteria such as Keywords to avoid and the software filters them out. It may also filter out what you want to receive so use with care.
10. Auto Direct Message and Auto @ Messages – as highlighted in the advice for you above so other people monitor for occurrences of their username. Including someone’s username in the Tweet greatly increases the chances that it will be read. The more sophisticated tools allow you to search, filter and segment your followers or Twitter users to identify people based on certain criteria. Then having developed a targeted list the tools allow you to broadcast to them, ideally on a trickle basis. Checkout SocialOomph Professional, Tweetsbot, TweetAdder, Hummingbird and similar if you are contemplating this. Warning – if you directly message your followers or broadcast to users who are not following you then you risk being reported for SPAM and having your account terminated.

If you are just starting with Twitter or want to re-activate a dormant profile then I have developed a 10 step, 30 day ‘Taming Twitter’ sequence specifically to guide you through the process. It takes you through the key activities and sets you on the right path to make the most of Twitter.

You can register for the sequence at Taming Twitter here.

Good luck

Mark.

Sales funnel 2.0 – Social meets CRM -> SCRM

You don’t need me to tell you that online channels, Internet Marketing, Social Media and Online Business Networks  have developed very rapidly over the last few months and years. New terms are entering the marketing and sales vocabulary particularly Social CRM, SCRM and Sales funnel 2.0. So what does all this have to do with a smaller business, and what can they do to make sense of it and move forward? What follows are some thoughts and ideas of how they link together and an approach to joining them up.

Don’t interrupt, attract me!

One major change is the decline in effectiveness of ‘Interrupt Marketing’ and the rise in ‘Attraction Marketing’. Cold calling and direct mail are in decline and search marketing has been very much on the rise.

This new Attraction Marketing paradigm has been paraphrased and summarised quite neatly by a the phrase ‘Know me, Like me, Follow (Trust) me, coined by Penny Power of ecademy.

Get yourself Found

A vital first stage and key here is to be ‘Found’ when people are looking for what you offer, or are looking to solve a problem where you have the solution. Unless you are doing very well and getting way more leads and business than you can handle from your current contact network, channel partners, referrals, physical networking etc. then putting yourself in a position where you can be found by a much wider community of potential customers is pretty important.

Be relevant

Google has championed and facilitated this with its crusade for ‘relevance’. Google’s objective is to strive to deliver a better experience to someone using its search engine, by matching great content and highly relevant Adwords adverts to every natural search. Search marketing, link building etc is a very specific discipline or online marketing, but the principles are widely applicable. Put yourself in your customers shoes, see things through their eyes. If they had a problem or need you could solve, where would they go and what would they look for? Put yourself in that place, using those words.

Be an Authority

To do well in the Search engines you need to present yourself as an authority in your area of expertise or niche. To be attractive you need to come across as an expert ‘problem solver’, rather than a product or service sales-person. You need to show that you add value, to increase the money in the prospects bank account, not just deplete it. You also need to put out new material on a very regular basis. But it’s increasingly difficult to get to the top of the Search rankings, as it’s a very crowded and competitive place to be.

Develop your Social Media Hub

Social Media is a great way to establish your authority, to demonstrate your value add and to be found. As an individual or small business it’s well worth developing a Hub within Social Media. By this I mean somewhere (a primary place) that you keep regularly updated with content that supports your authority position. Your hub could well be your Blog if you publish content, or Facebook / LinkedIn / ecademy for networking and group discussions. You’ll need to update your hub regularly in order to build your brand.

It’s worth having this hub embedded within a relevant community rather than being stand-alone. A Blog within WordPress or Blogger will attract cross-links and be Search Engine Indexed very quickly. A Facebook, LinkedIn or ecademy page will be a focal point for your contacts there. A six page brochure-ware site on an obscure hosting platform (to make a point) will be extremely ineffective as your hub as it will be very hard to get it found. It will take much more effort in the search engines and satellite communities to attract and direct traffic to your site.

Develop your Social Media Satellites

With the Hub in place the next step (if justified) is to develop the satellites. These are your presence on the minor social networks and elsewhere. Elsewhere could be Twitter, which you can use to highlight items you’ve published or things you are doing day by day or resources your target audience could find useful and that support your authority position. This could be articles that you publish and distribute through ezine articles and similar. It could be YouTube if you’re into video, either with you in-front of the camera or an audio slideshow. There are many secondary media where you can set out your stall, build up a presence and where you reach out to a new audience. However, do try to draw people back to your Hub to reduce duplication of effort and mainstream your prospect funnel.

Farm Social Media to Feed your CRM

The next step (again if justified) is to draw people from the hub, and maybe from the satellites, into your CRM. There are many advantage of drawing people into your CRM system. One is that you can communicate, track and prioritise much more directly than you can in Social Media or Search.

Switch on Marketing Automation

Using Marketing Automation techniques especially email marketing and auto-responders you can make your messages much more specific and tailored to the recipient, not just in terms of their interests but also how far along any buying process they may be. You also have multiple opportunities to put your messages out to them. In this way you can increase the potential sales value of the prospect, to outweigh the acquisition and development cost. You can also do this without your competitors being too aware of what is happening, as may be the case in the open environment of social media.

Put together a joined-up plan for Social CRM

An online communications strategy, together with a plan, and a joined up approach is a great way to increase your sales pipeline and generate leads. By developing and executing a joined-up plan along the lines above it doesn’t need to take excessive amounts of time. However it isn’t something that can be built and become effective overnight. Start planning now and take action progressively and in 6-12 months you should be seeing significant results from your SCRM project.

Salesforce.com links to Twitter

Integration between CRM and Social Media is on a roll, helping innovative Marketing and Sales organisations really get first mover advantage.

In a previous post I profiled the Microsoft Dynamics CRM link to Twitter.

In a subsequent one I’ll profile the WeCanDo.Biz CRM Twitter integration.

What these links essentially mean for mid-size and larger companies is that a marketing department can be picking up and filtering potential needs and buying signals and gathering valuable market intelligence.

With this they can start to engage with the individual(s) or update business development or account managers who have primary relationships.

This provides a really strong competitive advantage to any sales organisation with these tools and processes in place.

Conversely, if you haven’t got these in place then you could find yourself on the back foot in new business opportunities and in existing customers.

The marketing landscape is rapidly getting a whole lot more interesting!

WeCanDoBiz and WeCanDoCrm Review

Two major marketing and sales concepts come together in this ‘WeCanDo’ solution, making this a VERY interesting proposition for an entrepreneur looking for a Business Network and a CRM solution in one stop. Even better as the entry level is Free of Charge and the Pro level is £19.95 per month.

A Networking Hub

Like many networks (ecademy, Linkedin, Facebook etc) you create a profile page. Other systems offer slightly more in this area, but the interesting part with WeCanDo is the ability to provide Endorsements on businesses to build their reputation and also to post any needs you have, so other businesses can contact you with solutions. Your keywords also feed you with relevant discussion threads and you can see who visited your profile page.

A CRM Hub

As an entry level (free) CRM this is pretty well featured. There is a Contacts Database (into which you can upload contacts from elsewhere), set up Accounts (a company with multiple contacts), Groups and run reports. There is a Diary function for appointments and contact history and reports. On the pipeline side, there is a leads tracking system flowing through to customer purchase history, with ability to specify products or services. And on the marketing front there is a newsletter facility to send to groups or individuals, SMS campaign support, email survey and analysis and reports. There is also support for Customer service and to share documents and reports.

The CRM engine is provided by ‘Customers really matter’ and their ‘InTouch’ product. This is a UK developed CRM developed specifically for SMEs and offered as a hosted solution, reducing the technical complexity and cost for entrepreneurs.

Assessment

From my initial use and assessment of the system I offer the following comments:

FOR:

–         Integration of Network and CRM support

–         Good network functionality with nice features

–         Very good CRM functionality for the entry level

–         Hosted solution delivery reducing cost and complexity

Considerations:

–         The network is relatively small – claiming 12,500 members to Nov 2009

–         Limited profile page so some businesses will also want a Website

–         I have not checked whether it has any multi-user capability yet.

Comparisons:

–         Adobe Business Catalyst from resellers like NewIcon – CRM, Ecommerce, Website

–         Infusionsoft combining email marketing, CRM and e-commerce

Conclusion

WeCanDoBiz looks like a strong networking and CRM contender for entrepreneurs and offers many features that should deliver great productivity, efficiency and effectiveness.

If implemented and used well WeCanDoCRM should lead to more sales, certainly when compared with manual processes or a fragmented patchwork of technology.

Links

My Profile page on WeCanDoBiz

Home page and Video on WeCanDoCRM

Social Media Landscape map – choose your tools.

I was looking for a catalogue or index to the social media tools available and was delighted to come across this chart below, produced by Overdrive Interactive.

In it they list the major websites and tools in each of the following categories, with live links to each site:

• Social Networks
• Video Sites
• Search Engines
• Micro Blogging
• B2B Social Networks
• Blog platforms
• Photo Sites
• Travel reviews
• Groups
• Wikis
• Social Bookmarking
• Podcast

One use for this could be to help identify which of the categories are best for your business and social media plans, and then choose and develop using one of the tools in that category.

And if you are already on the social media journey then it can help identify if you also need to add a new category, or to switch tools within a category if what you are using is not achieving your objectives.

To view the 1 page PDF select this link social-media-map

Thanks to Overdrive; contactable at  http://www.ovrdrv.com/maps/